MIT Moves Toward Open Access

With academic journals charging libraries increasingly high subscription rates, Massachusetts Institute of Technology passed a resolution to make it easier for faculty authors to share and distribute their work for free.

MIT said faculty members will grant open access to all journal articles through DSpace, an open-source digital repository created by MIT and Hewlett Packard.

Professors usually strike up agreements to publish their works with individual journals, but once the copyright for a scholarly work belongs to that publisher, it can be difficult or impossible to reuse it for another publication or even as course material. University libraries are having a tough time keeping up with rising subscription costs.

“Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors,” says Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and chair of MIT’s committee on open-access publishing. “In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals.”

Mr. Abelson, who is also a founding director of the copyright nonprofit Creative Commons, says that the rise of the Internet has spurred a decade of worries for universities about open access to scholarly works. While online databases and journals make it easy and cheap to distribute academic research, those works have also become far more valuable with the ability to link to other works and index selected parts of the data.

“The system has gotten out of balance,” he says. “Journal business models are going to have to stop focusing so much on … this monopoly on the right of distribution, and instead focus on the places where they do provide value.”

MIT based the language of its agreement on those made at other universities, including Harvard and Stanford, which have also passed motions for open-access publishing but do not have a university-wide agreement like MIT’s. Faculty members will be able to opt out of the agreement on an individual basis.

“What we’re really talking about here is control of the scholarly record,” says Mr. Abelson. “What I really hope is that some other universities will follow suit.”